I thought that for my first short story installment of October, I’d answer one of the questions Reid and I have received the most since embarking upon our RV journey: “How did you two decide to quit your jobs and do this?”
The answer might disappoint you, I’m afraid. Or, at the very least, underwhelm you. I shall press on in the telling though.
The main reason I grow concerned that people will be alarmingly underwhelmed by the backstory of our decision is because of the fact that neither one of us even remembers how or who first thought of the RVing idea.
In February 2017, Reid and I went out for Valentine’s Day date night dinner at a local brewery in Redondo Beach. I was in-between jobs and actively job-seeking, as I had just quit my second recruiting job after giving it all of a three-weeks try in January. So naturally, we took this date night as an opportunity for open conversation about what the heck we wanted to do next with our lives.
Reid was in a rotational program at Boeing that was going well, but he already knew it wasn’t what he wanted to do for the rest of his life, or even the majority of his next career years. June 2017 would be when he’d take a sabbatical to travel around South America with his brother, but I actually can’t even remember if we’d started talking about that trip yet as of February.
All I remember is that at some point in this conversation, the idea that maybe I could start solely looking for a job that I could do remotely came up, and the possibility was thrown out there that we travel full-time for a period of time while we figure out where we want to live longer-term.
How did we think of RVing specifically? I wish I could tell you.
Neither one of us knew anyone at that moment in time who was doing the full-time #RVlyfe. We hadn’t started listening to the podcasts or watching the YouTubers that we found later on after deciding to commit to RVing. So, the idea’s origin might just have to remain a mystery to all of us.
However, for all intents and purposes, let’s just establish as fact that the seed was first planted in a random brainstorm of a conversation full to the brim with possibilities of life plans that Valentine’s.
Then, the last week of February I got offered a job as the assistant to the CEO of a startup company right there on the Redondo Beach Pier office buildings, which I accepted and started the first day of March. Reid went to South America then came back and quit his job at Boeing in July to start focusing on launching his own online business, and before we knew it, it was January 2018 and time to evaluate our life’s course again at the start of the new year.
Now that Reid was 100% able to work from anywhere, his wheels were already turning for if we could make the possibility of full-time traveling our reality. I was enjoying my job enough to not dread going to work every day and actually felt happy enough while at the office, but still, it was a job and I didn’t want to have an office job forever, seeing as I already knew I want to be a stay-at-home mom once we have kids eventually.
Even though I don’t remember all of the details that led up to our next conversation, I do remember the exact conversation in which we committed to making the RV plan a reality.
In January 2018, we were driving down to spend the night with our friends who lived about 45 minutes away from us in Huntington Beach. Conversations about what the heck we want to do with our lives are never an uncommon occurrence for Reid and I, and as I mentioned we’d already been having some level of those types of discussions for the new year, so it wasn’t totally out of the blue for Reid to glance over at me in the passenger seat and say, “So, I’ve figured out what we’re going to do with our lives.”
Life planning overwhelms and exhausts me, so it’s no shocker that I excitedly turned to Reid and said, “Thank God, do tell.”
“We’re going to sell all our stuff, buy an RV, and travel to as many states as we can while figuring out what we want to do for work that we can do from anywhere in the world.”
His tone as he said this was one vacillating between a shrug and a stamp of approval, one of throwing a crazy idea out there with the full expectation of getting shot down but may as well see what sticks.
I said, “Okay, let’s do it.”
And that’s all folks. We did it. Before the end of January, I talked to my boss about leaving but staying on remotely to still do whatever work they might have for me I could do from the road. In March, for my birthday weekend, we rented an RV to test it out to travel up to a wedding in Central Coast California area, which we enjoyed and determined would be a doable lifestyle for us.
Then all through April I sent Reid RVtrader.com listings for used RVs for sale, on April 29th he purchased our 1999 Winnebago Brave from a family in San Diego, then by the end of May, we had found a replacement roommate for us in the house we were renting, sold the vast majority of our possessions, shipped 11 boxes of wedding gift-kitchen items and sentimental wall hangings back to store at his parents’ house in Texas, and moved into the RV full-time as of June 1st, 2018. But more about that crazy week in particular in my next installment!
